Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM!nsb From: nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein) Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew Subject: Re: .amsalien Message-ID: Date: 5 Mar 90 14:17:30 GMT References: <8ZvpJwb01EthQbikxR@gaucho.rand.org> Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 31 I think this one is actually fairly easy to diagnose. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the documentation, I'm pretty sure that it says that an AMS tree root must be a directory whose name starts with ".MESSAGES". That is, it can be ".MESSAGES", ".MESSAGES_foobar", etc. The reason for this restriction is that it is often necessary to find the root of an AMS tree, given a folder path name. The root is now well-defined as the first .MESSAGES* directory that it finds upon climbing up the tree. Given that your root does not follow this convention, I suspect that AMS is unable to figure out where to look for the .amsalien file, and then things break down further from there. My suggestion is that you create a symbolic link from ~/.MESSAGES_MH to ~/Mail, and make ~/.MESSAGES_MH the thing you add to your mspath preference. My guess is that if that does not solve the problem, it will at least get you considerably further along before the next problem rears its ugly head. BTW, I do recommend that you incorporate patches 1-3, especially since you're on a SPARC, for which several core dump bug fixes have been released. Also, in answer to your debugging question: the magic command you want for any messageserver-related debugging is "set debug 0 0 0 -1". You can control the quantity of output by replacing the -1 with some other number, but then you'll have to look at the code to figure out which number you want, which is probably not worth the trouble.... Hope that helps. -- Nathaniel